


Captain Salamander: An American Icon in Brussels

by allgrave



Category: Captain America (Movies), Salamander (TV)
Genre: Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-01
Updated: 2014-08-01
Packaged: 2018-02-11 08:42:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2061528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allgrave/pseuds/allgrave
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve Rogers visits Brussels to investigate rumours of HYDRA's links with the Belgian secret society, Salamander, and to boost SHIELD's flagging reputation. According to his brief, he is to be working with the celebrated police officer, Paul Gerardi, and his colleague and lover Vic Adams.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Inspector Adams misses a meeting

**Author's Note:**

  * For [santaevita](https://archiveofourown.org/users/santaevita/gifts), [judejones](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=judejones).



Getting asked for an autograph at Customs - that was new. Guess what Tony had said about Belgium had some validity. Starved for the famous like… Steve couldn’t remember the exact phrasing, but it would be in the notebook somewhere. Over the last few months the notebook had morphed from a _précis_ of the significant cultural and political events since 1945 into a collection of Tony’s _bon mots_. Steve smiled: _précis, bon mots_ ; he had this international relations thing nailed.

 

That was actually a big part of the job, he had been told. SHIELD, rebuilding itself in jolts, was fairly unpopular the world over. Everybody had sort of known that spying was going on, sure, but there was spying and there was this. Governments everywhere were jumping to look serious in their opposition to what had happened, and their refusal to let it continue. Especially the ones which had been colluding in it in the first place. TV interviews in the immediate aftermath had shown Steve, concerned frown on face, struggling to explain the nuances of SHIELD’s culpability to unsympathetic hosts. Steve couldn’t especially blame them: “it wasn’t us; it was the crypto-Nazis who had taken charge of us” was a hard line to sell to the friendliest audience, let alone this. Now Greenland had revoked their free plane trips for Bruce and even Norway was starting to make uneasy noises about Thor.

 

Still, Herman the customs official hadn’t minded. Just beamed at Steve and tried to move the little camera to fit them both into the frame. Here’s hoping his contact would be the same. Should check his name - Peter Gabriel? No, that was from the notebook. Blurred memories of an evening of tequila and Tony and Bruce’s accomplished lip-syncing returned to Steve’s mind and sort of took over. Things were good with both, though Bruce had been pretty distant recently. Important not to crowd him when he’s like that, Tony had said, and he probably knew. They both had this sort of instinct with the other that could make Steve feel excluded now and then. Ah. There it was: not Peter Gabriel, Paul Gerardi.

 

Steve glanced over the details again. Salamander. War gold. Systemic corruption. Murder. International implications. Possible HYDRA connections. Steve struggled to be interested in the details: conspiracy in the upper échelons of Belgian society - did anybody further than Luxembourg really care? Steve’s attention was more caught by the photograph attached, a small grainy image of Belgium’s Incorruptible Super-Cop: a slightly rubbery face, clean-shaven and swept back grey hair that curled round the ears, a nose that jutted up out of the picture and a strange sort of smile. A little of Tony in that smirk? No, this was different. Tony’s was a sort of contraction of the lower half of his face plus two raised eyebrows; this guy looked like someone was squashing half his face up to a side. Weird.

 

He should be waiting with a car. Automatic doors opened to reveal a grey sky and lots of cars, but a quick scan of them revealed no Paul Gerardi. Gerardi, Super-Cop. This was something the government here, or what was left of it, was genuinely trying to make happen. The Belgian answer to superheroes: rigorous, justice-loving, all those other things Steve had to be, with scarcely any time for an alcohol-fuelled Peter Gabriel sing-along, though that perhaps wasn’t a bad thing. Good luck to him, Steve thought, looking at the picture again: he’s going to need it with that smile. A mechanical rattle caught Steve’s ear and he looked up to see a small knocked-about green car loping towards him through the car park at a rate that looked beyond its abilities. Scratching a BMW with malice it halted with an indignant splutter a couple inches in front of Steve. A grey head popped out from the driver’s side.

 

“Hi! You’re the guy, yes? Captain America?”

 

Steve recognized the face, though now covered in a growth of slightly uneven stubble. The voice was like the car, but with a lilt that made Steve a little on edge like he was being laughed at.

 

International relations time: “Oui, c’est moi. Et tu - - vous -”

 

“Yes, you can call me Paul. Get in this side.”

 

Steve put his duffel bag in the boot then got into the passenger seat. Paul’s arm brushed against his as he changed gear: he scarcely seemed to notice Steve but was the first to speak.

 

“We do not have...uh...much time while you are here so we go straight to the meeting.”

 

Steve started to protest - he must know how long the flight was; he could hardly string a sentence together in English, let alone…. The car stopped suddenly and Steve turned with irritation and surprise to his left. Right up close the strongly lined face with no trace of a smirk now.

 

“I am sorry. We do not have much time while you are here. The meeting will be short.”

 

The car jerked into movement again, Paul’s face turned again to the road. Bullshit, thought Steve; he tried to arrange himself more comfortably in his seat, ideally without Paul’s arm brushing against his.

 

“Oh, and one thing else -” Steve could not tell if he was smirking now - “don’t try speaking French. Only wankers do that.”

 

They arrived at the police headquarters, which was as ugly as most police headquarters Steve had encountered. A slightly apologetic look about the windows in this one. Fair enough too - from the sounds of it the police here, like SHIELD, was still going through some pretty intensive weeding.

 

The car stopped and Steve was thrown forwards a little. Steve looked at Paul with hostility and noticed him frowning.

 

“I expect Vic, that is, Inspector Adams to meet us. Wait here. I will get you soon.”

 

Steve was not warming to Paul. He didn’t like to be haughty about it or anything, but this visit was basically a gesture of polite condescension. It was Steve’s job, therefore, to be the patronising one, but this cop was treating him like a child. Steve was at least twice this guy’s age anyway. Asshole. Hadn’t even let him speak French.

 

Steve followed this train of jet-lag fuelled grumbling for a few minutes, when a piercing wail went up from the building. Blue uniforms began spilling out from the double doors Paul had gone into as the siren gained in intensity. Steve stepped out of the car and grabbed the arm of one of an officer running out of the building.

 

“Je m’excuse, gendarme -”

 

The police officer shouted something angrily back at him in Flemish, as she tugged her arm away.

 

“What is it with you police and the French language?” Steve looked at the officer’s startled face and realized he was shouting. The combined effects of confusion, a sense of displacement, very little sleep and an ever-loudening siren were stretching him. He started to apologize, but felt a hand on his arm.

 

“Wait. Shut up please. It is you. Captain America. Perhaps...there is a bomb. Help. Please.”

 

The officer was left with her hand extended into air, as Steve disappeared through a large hole he had just made in the wall by the double doors. She waited until the figure was out of sight and put a hand to her ear:

 

“Apex? Eagle and Matchstick both inside the building; repeat - inside the building. Stage Two commence. Hail HYDRA.”

 

\---

 

The first thing Steve had seen in the room was the blinking display with the numbers going down. Sixty seconds. Then the slumped form of a middle-aged man, bald with a small beard; a decent-sized gut wrapped tightly round with plastic explosives and lots of small coloured wires stretching out from him to the box with the display. Fifty seconds. By him on the ground, Paul Gerardi kneeling, mouth a thin unsteady line and skin around the eyes bright red. Paul’s head swivels to Steve.

 

“Please! Something. Please not again.”

 

The last bit not directed at Steve and it’s forty seconds now and Steve is standing there and doesn’t know what to do. Tony knew about bombs and had taught him a little. Enough to know that trying to move the bomb or the bald man will set the whole thing off. Thirty. Best shot now is to save Paul. Steve moves to help him up but all of a sudden Steve has a gun pointing at his face. Paul hisses.

 

“Why don’t you just leave, Captain America?”

 

Paul turns back to the slumped figure, grey head pressed against bald. Steve sees a dark bloody patch on the bald man’s head. Twenty.

 

“For fuck’s sake, run!” Paul shouts through tears and Steve doesn’t want to but he turns to the door. Nothing else to do.

 

Two black-suited figures block his exit, stood in the doorway with large guns aimed at his chest. Ten. That crest on their chests he would know anywhere. HYDRA. Steve wants to close his eyes but does not. He stares at them, sensing the timer behind his head running down through the last few seconds. Friends and lovers flit through his head and he tries to focus his mind on Tony and Bruce. For all that, he can’t quite distract himself from where he is right now. The pride of the USA to die in Belgium - some joke. Steve fixes the henchman on the right with a look of outraged contempt and he hears a small beep as his face forms itself into a smirk newly discovered but now etched onto his brain.

 

Zero.

 

Steve waits for the bang. And waits. A low chuckle comes from the doorway instead.

 

“No boom for you today Paul, I’m afraid. Captain Rogers, pleased to meet you - ah ah ah, Paul. I really would not try that.”

 

Steve hears the click behind him of a gun cocked then slowly placed on the ground. Steve sees a tall figure emerge, a misshapen rubberish black suit and hair slicked back with vast amounts of gel. A sharp growl from behind him.

 

“Shut up,” comes the command from the suited man. “Shut up and follow me.”


	2. Subterranean Homesick Blues

Vic’s eyes swum milky as a bright glare forced itself through his lids and battered the walls of his skull. A burst of recollection shot him through with new pain. A man with a terrible suit; vague threats and posturing; bargaining. Yes. Paul would live; only Captain America needed to die. Next came threats. The things Paul might learn. That one secret, coated in a silence Paul could never penetrate, that one that stuck low in Vic’s throat, jumped higher with each kiss, but sunk deep back down before their mouths parted. That secret - Paul would know it. The threat had its effect, though not the one they had intended. Vic couldn’t: he had secrets enough. Another would kill him. Instead, he had narrowed his eyes, hardened his face and started writing him the address of a good tailor. Could have done more on the face-hardening bit, thought Vic wryly, and raised bound hands to tentatively feel the right side of his face, assessing how much was crust and how much pulp. Thirty-seventy, he’d say. Focussing beyond the pain, Vic heard his body making noises of vague life and beyond that one - no, two - other sets of breathing. Both long and deep, but only one with those telltale occasional stammers, infrequent interruptions of the steady flow, those small chokes of vulnerability which he had heard and felt next to him at night.

 

Vic managed to get his left eye open and the intense white light began to whittle into the defined form of a tungsten bulb suspended. Paul, collapsed in a chair to Vic’s left with hands and feet tied up. Each breath did a little to disrupt the bloodied grey hair swept across his face. Vic had been the bait then: the worm used to catch Paul. The first time Paul let Vic meet Sophie he had only left the room for a moment to fetch something - a newspaper maybe - but she had leaned forwards to him and called him a worm. Made worse by the Paul he could see in her face. Vic thought about calling to Paul but he was asleep, however uncomfortably, and Vic did not want to wake him.

 

The other breaths caught Vic’s curiosity. He twisted his head to the right and at first it felt like an optical illusion. Everything was scaled up: man, chair, manacles. A white, impossibly clean T-shirt curled round chest and arm muscles; and that face, its contours shaped with harsh exactness by the bulb-glare and eyes looking more tired than in the pictures, but still him. A double bait then: worm to catch a minnow to catch a trout. Some trout it was too. Captain America: the frozen man, returned with a past still working through the nerves from eye to brain, come to inflict it on a people who would rather it stayed buried. But no, it was different for them, for Americans. His body had not been exhumed but resurrected and the same with his past. Pre-Korea, pre-Vietnam. Vic was sitting next to blonde-haired, square-jawed security and hope. Awkward memories like Lindbergh and camps for Japanese-Americans buried in a warm glow of pastel-coloured nostalgia - not the pain of the journey home, but the anaesthetic of a trip away. The very idea of Captain America would sound fascist anywhere else - some racist wrapped in a flag shouting slogans. What could a Captain Belgium do? At best, sigh and look sheepish; move on and stay silent. Always looking to the Resistance; never to the Acquiescence. Never looking our sins in the face, the ones that bite our souls to the quick. Vic felt hatred for this man hug his throat, for those placid features, smooth and beautiful even in this searching glare where Vic felt himself impenetrably ugly.  

 

“Oh, hey! You’re up. Shucks - they really did a number on you. Ouch. Oh, I’m Steve by the way; I think you’re probably Vic. I’d offer you my hand, but -”

 

He lifted up large, metal-bound hands and chuckled.

 

Ha. Vic would have smiled blandly back, but only half of his face worked.

 

“Hello, Captain.”

 

“Oh wow. Jeez, I’m sorry - no need to move your face. That must sting like heck.”

 

Vic was too tired and hurt to process the English except for a few words. Shucks, heck - did anybody ever speak like that? Did SHIELD teach him that specially? Vic managed one word back. The other nodded.

 

“Paul? Yeah. He got it pretty bad. Same mistake you made from the sounds of it. [chuckle] Nobody told me you guys were so darn stubborn. Not even a real point to the interrogation from what I could see; they knew everything anyway. Helpful for us though. They’re clearly scared. Scared pretty bad actually. You guys were right with that Salamander-HYDRA connection, by the way. What is it with these guys and reptiles anyway?”

 

Chuckle.

 

“Amphibian,” said Vic.

 

Undaunted, another chuckle and the captain went on, telling Vic what he already knew, what he and Paul had worked out months ago and struggled to get SHIELD to listen to any longer that the time it took for a patronising wave of the hand. Follow the money: the old rule. How did they think HYDRA had stayed afloat so long? Salamander had been one of many organisations - yes, the majority were named after reptiles to be fair - but it was more than just another disposable head. It was a bank. The members were really only cashiers and Belgian politics a sort of hobby. Vic looked darkly at him: politics as hobby; the captain would know something about that.

 

“...’course, this is big. Plan is humiliation or something similar - reason we’re still breathing, I guess -”

 

Interruption from left. A groan and a string of slurred Flemish. Vic makes out ‘exposition’ and ‘bollocks’.

 

“Oh, you’re awake too! Swell - I was just telling Vic here -”

 

“I heard. I know.”

 

Vic had lost interest in the captain; all his attention was on Paul. He could hear worry beneath the usual gruffness. Vic tried for eye-contact but Paul was looking past him.

 

“You heard? Oh, swell!”

 

Swell. Second time in twenty seconds. He’s slipping. That smile though: all those white teeth. Forties dental hygiene must have actually been pretty good.

 

“Whaddya thinking in terms of a plan then?”

 

“Plan? Fuck off.”

 

Just for a moment, Vic caught the perfect smile faltering. A deep-sounding sadness covered his face then evaporated, but Vic could see that it had always been there in the eyes: it had just spilt out.

 

The three heads turned as a door opposite Vic opened and the room quickly filled with uniforms, their dull black and greys only interrupted by the small stylised skull and tentacles. Tentacles an odd touch: maybe confused as to what a hydra was; would explain the salamander thing. After the influx dries up he entered. Now, like in court, something implacably gawky about him: the legs not quite moving in time; the excessive hair gel; the gormless lips. These had probably been what had got him off the charges: these and the lawyers. And, as always, such an ugly suit. Vic saw that it was the same one he had been wearing just before he was knocked out, but it looked different in this light; at once oily and wrinkled, it clung to his arms but left space at the shoulders, and little pits and ridges ran all over it.

 

“Captain Rogers, Inspector Adams, and, mon ancien ami, Paul.”

 

A fresh groan came from Vic’s left. ‘Fuck’s sake’ clearly audible.

 

“Nasty cuts theree, Paul. I suggest you don’t strain yourself. Drive yourself to some injury, I should say.”

 

Laboured certainly, and clumsily delivered, but it was enough to make Paul struggle to get up till he was pushed back with a crunch by the butt of a gun. Vic couldn’t hold back a shout.

 

“Inspector Adams, you are perhaps admiring my suit now that your grey thing has acquired so much red. Your little joke about tailors no doubt now makes you feel quite silly.”

 

A giggle from Paul, though half-gurgle, burnt away the pain and fear Vic was feeling and replaced it with thick pride.

 

“As well you might,” he continued. “Look carefully, Inspector Adams. Swen from the skins of six hundred and forty black salamanders.”

 

This time the laughter came from the right. He had been quiet up to this point, the captain, but the chuckle of earlier bubbled out, and grew rapidly to a great throb of sound that rebounded off the walls. It filled Vic with a new pride, something quite different from the tight reciprocal warmth that Paul’s laugh had given him; this was a broader feeling, the laughter didn’t sit in the heart and belly but ran through the whole body, imparting a shared knowledge of assured righteousness and total victory.

 

The man in the salamander-suit detected it too and if, as the captain had said, he had seemed scared during the interrogation, he was terrified now - and angry. Vic looked at the sweat on his forehead that shone in the bulb-glare and wondered how he saw this as ending, what he had been thinking. He wasn’t cut out for this. Had it just been him and Paul he had to deal with, he might have stood a chance: a couple shallow graves out by the N8; an end. But the laws governing Captain America were not those that ruled the Belgium that the three of them knew. That laugh, which was still building, told you that what would follow now was merely a matter of form, that Good - a Good somehow purified of all its difficult inclarity - would triumph, leaving in its wake a wreckage with just enough power left in it to make the next victory meaningful. But the laughter said more - it was prompted by the suit. This man, with a suit made of salamanders, would not be there to see the next victory: you needed an admixture of brilliance and stupidity to play the arch-villain game: all this guy had was mediocrity and poor dress-sense. Captain America didn’t have to worry about being bothered by him again. And the suited man knew this too, Vic could see that; he could feel in his pulse that he was going to be defeated and that great and temporary pain was the best he could hope for. Vic had seen sadness in Captain America’s eyes and had associated it with his own pain at the cruelty with which Paul held others distant. He was right, in a sense, but he had misunderstood. The captain was distant too, removed yet attached to this inescapable narrative of triumph, the defeat of Redskull re-run and re-run, with each new victory doing more to undercut than confirm the previous. He was cut off from this narrative, from his time and from his country, but wedded to them all, an unwilling bridegroom going up an endless aisle.

 

“Shut up!” and the suit seemed to writhe with its owner’s rage. But the laughter still grew and the figures with guns shrank to make space. They were looking amongst each other, some shuffling towards the door, frightened but without knowing quite why as their leader’s roar was drowned in the waves of his enemy’s laugh. Vic stared at Paul and the blue-grey eyes met his this time. The smirk was there.

 

The swerve of a glistening suit and the sharp drumming of machine-gun fire, quickly truncated. Vic didn’t see how it was done; it didn’t really matter. He later gathered that the laughter had been a deliberate provocation, as he used the spray of bullets to break his chains, or some similar piece of super-hero logic. Vic had been pushed to ground with the first firing of the gun, Paul knocking both their chairs down with a lunge. Bullets swarmed and ricocheted in the small room and the bulb shattered inaudibly, showering glass and throwing the room into darkness, except for the light which came from the doorway, where heavily armed figures were already running through to get away. Though the air seemed thick with metal, Vic could see the shape of Captain America, impossibly large, weaving between bullets like a dancer. This was his world, but the blood belonged to theirs, not the captain’s. Genetically-modified fists connected with skulls and didn’t stop. Righteous slaughter and brain-matter to be scraped out later from under the fingernails. A body hit the wall near Vic’s head with a sickly cracking noise and Vic saw the thrower’s face, briefly illuminated: the same steady smile; the same sad eyes.

 

A yelp from Paul and Vic refocussed on the foreground where a figure crawled painfully towards them, dozens of perforations in a salamander suit. A gun sat equidistant from the three of them. Vic knew Paul would reach it before the suited man: punctured lungs don’t make for speed and the look in his eyes suggested he had already given up. Paul would reach it and save them both - the old story and a new act of Gerardi heroism, perhaps even a new medal. And then, in the night, a new stammer in his breath as well, something to join the other faces, always killed in self-defence but still that same look of hurt surprise. Vic always slept well. The faces didn’t trouble him in the same way. He could still draw them to mind if he concentrated, but all the same some were starting to blur. Poacher turned gamekeeper, but the deer sensed it, which, Vic considered, in some ways made the job easier.

 

Very well then.

 

Vic got to the gun first, held it in bound hands, fired. The head rolled perpendicular, a small hole in the forehead, whence trickled blood downwards, that mingled with sweat and hair gel and formed a small pool on the ground. Dead and, with him, the secret. One face flitted briefly into Vic’s head then receded. He waited for the captain to complete his job.

 

\---

 

Sort out details and follow-up took a few days and Vic spent most of them in hospital. When the nurses approached him, Paul had just pushed them away; he had waited until Vic was secured in the ambulance then left without saying goodbye. Vic suspected that something had happened since between Paul and Captain America, Steve, as Paul was calling him now. Vic couldn’t be sure - maybe it was just the atmosphere of the hospital getting to him, but it had stayed when Vic and Paul went to say goodbye to Steve at the airport. Vic looked on as the handshake seemed to be held just a little too long, while their eyes met then parted a little too quickly. Both smiling as though there was a joke Vic hadn’t heard. Then Steve boarded the plane for New York and if anything had happened it was done now. But the secret was still there, just another one.

 

Vic didn’t miss Steve, but as Paul drove him home it felt as though an old room, thrown briefly open to the air, had been once more resealed, consigned to dust mite and moth. Vic hadn’t expected the offer and it had been communicated in a tone that Vic remembered from the early days of working with Paul, before anything more had happened between them. The mired fingers of an attendant dusk cradled the vehicle and country as the rattle of Paul’s car kept time with the decaying measure of all that could be felt and seen.

 

“Vic.”

 

The same tone, and Vic saw Paul’s hands holding the wheel so tightly that there was no blood around the knuckles. Vic turned to look straight ahead, nails of his hands carving into his palms and white sickness bulging in gut and neck.

 

“When they were...questioning me, back in - back in -”

 

Vic watched the road ahead as it rolled under the bonnet, back and beneath them, carelessly drawing them onwards.

 

“The night Sophia died, Vic, why weren’t you watching the house?”

  
Miles above a plane roared as it moved to a country miles away, and the road in front of Vic’s eyes, though it blurred a little, kept coming into view then disappearing under them and behind them, forgotten and hidden in the onward movement and the imminent night.


End file.
